How to learn all of Chinese History

The power and importance of scaffolding

A few weeks ago I wrote “How to learn all the presidents”. It was a good primer on how I have been using memory palaces with my kids. But it was limited in that it focused on just learning the names of all the presidents. Memory Palaces can be more powerful than that. I think the best way to explain how else they can be used is with an example. So here is the memory palace for learning the basics of Chinese history.

Why Learn Chinese History?

When I started this History Bee experiment with Everest I decided to better empathize with her by trying to learn some things myself. I started with Chinese history — a pretty significant gap in my knowledge that I had struggled to fill my entire adult life. Every time I “got into it” I would peter out soon after. Podcasts and books would go in one ear and out the other. I even tried creating Anki cards, but even that did not work very well. I didn’t have enough scaffolding to build from, so all the names and periods just merged together and everything was lost.

But with the help of memory palaces I think I have finally cracked it.

The key is to start with the basics. Build a the basic structure and only once you have that structured nailed do you try and add to it. To build the structure you use a memory palace, but to build a memory palace you need to know what to put in it. If you want to learn all the presidents, then you already know what you are going to include. For a nebulolous topic like “Chinese history” you need to make decisions about what to include and what not to include. Its even harder when you don’t know what you don’t know. This is the advantage of a class at school — not only will they teach you the topic, they will curate the things they will teach you.

The good news is we live in an age of miracles, and we can use generative AI to figure out what we should be learning.

I wrote a detailed prompt to ChatGPT 4.5 explaining what I needed and it spit out a well structured list of the topics I needed to know. I combined that with relevant searches on QBReader and I ended up with a solid collection of the most important events, people and things from Chinese history.

The nice thing about Chinese history is that there are distinct “Dynasties”. I decided to give each important dynasty its own room (There are some smaller, less important, dynasties I skipped. If I want to add them later I will just need to put them in-between rooms).

Each room has an image that helps us remember the name of the dynasty, but unlike the president palace where “That is it”, we also put in a bunch more images for all the other things we want to remember about that dynasty. There are fewer rooms than the president palace (14 vs 47), but each room is more full. It sounds a little harder in theory, and I think it might be harder than the “one thing per room” model, but it is not THAT hard, and if you have done the president one you should haev no trouble with this one. We used the same rooms as the presidents, so we sometimes even have the presidents interacting with the Chinese history if it helps make it more memorable.

Everest used this method to learn Chinese history from the first to second last dynasties in about an hour (plus review time with Anki cards of roughly an hour over the next week). She had already learned the Qing dynasty, the Chinese republic and Communis China, so we did not repeat it. I expect all three of those periods together would take roughly twice as long as the first 11 rooms.

At this point I expect Everest to be very competitive with any Chinese history question she encounters at Nationals.

The Backbone

Here are the rooms (Where it is not clear from the spelling I put the pronunciations in square brackets)

1. Xi Dynasty [She] → A woman (I use She-Ra. Everest uses Taylor Swift)

2. Shang Dynasty → The woman from room #1 walks in hangs from a rope

3. Zhou Dynasty [Joe] → Joe Biden

4. Qin Dynasty [Chin] → A giant chin (I picture Jay Leno)

5. Han Dynasty → Han Solo (warning: Everest initally kept calling this dynasty the “solo dynasty”)

6. Three Kingdoms → Three little pigs

7. Tang Dynasty → Kool-aid man

8. Song Dynasty → YMCA singing (I use the YMCA band vs another singer for a reason. See below)

9. Yuan Dynasty [Whan] → Genghis Khan (this is the Mongol dynasty. It was rule by Kublai Khan. But I have no idea what he looks like, so I just use his grandfather)

10. Ming Dynasty → A monkey with a ring

11. Qing Dynasty [Ching] → A cash register

12. Chinese Republic → A giant Sun (the first leader was Sun Yat-sen)

13. Communist China → Mao

14. Post-Mao China → A big letter Z (Current leader Xi Jinping)

That gives you the rough history of China. The next step is to give every dynasty a “stereotype” — what is one word or sentence that defines that dynasty that is easy to remember. Then we add the other elements we want to recall from each time period to the appropriate room

(One note: For people we have focused only on their family names (Which is what you need when answering questions in the History Bee). In China the family name is the FIRST name. So we don’t bother with images for the last/personal names, and we don’t worry about images for the personal names, but if you wanted to it would not be hard. In practice we often remember the personal names anyway without specific effort)

Xi Dynasty [She]

Legendary Dynasty. Unclear if it actually existed.

• Founder: Yu the Great (You look in a mirror)

• What he did: Tamed the floods (The room is knee deep in water)

Shang Dynasty

First Dynasty with Archeological evidence.

• They used bones and turtle shells as divination tools (the floor is covered with bones and turtle shells)

(don’t worry. It gets more interesting)

Zhou Dynasty [Joe]

The Philosophy Dynasty

• Key people: Confucius (looking confused), Taoism (I use Winnie the Pooh from the Two of Pooh), Sun Tzu (the sun)

• Writings: Analects (Ana is licking the paper), I Ching (we use an inappropriate image for this that I will not share publicly), Art of War (painting a picture of people fighting a war)

• Concept: Mandate of Heaven (a single beam of light shining into the room), Spring and Autumn Periods (we have leaves falling)

Qin Dynasty [Chin]

First United Empire of China. First Emperor of China

• Key people: Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China (just the chin. No additional image). Qin dies by drinking mercury that he thinks is the elixir of life, so we have him taking that action.

• Concepts: Legalism - Qin’s philosophy of brutal adherence to the rules (a judge)

• Things: Great Wall of China starts being build (a half built wall we step over), Terracotta Warriors where Qin is buried (image are the warriors), and the beginnings of the Grand Canal (same)

Han Dynasty

Concurrent with the Roman Empire. Han is the current ethnic group of most of today’s Chinese. It was the first golden age.

• Key people: Founded by Lui Bang [Louis] (We picture King Louis XIV banging on a drum)

• Concepts: Confucianism becomes state doctrine (we have Confucius walk from the Zhou room and say “hi”), Period split into Eastern and Western Han (we divide the room in two with the actual east and west parts of the room), The dynasty falls due to Eunuchs making children emperors and mis-managing things (we picture a Eunuch - that guy from Game of Thrones)

• Things: Silk Road to Rome (Actual silk spread out like a road to the next room)

• Wars: Yellow Turban Rebellion ends the dynasty (we picture yellow turbans)

Three Kingdoms Period

The period that inspired the book, “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”

• People: Cao Cao [Tow-Tow], leader of the kingdom that ends up winning, Zhuge Liang, the brilliant mastermind general (picture a HUGE person zooming on a luge)

• Wars: Battle of the Red Cliffs that kicked off the stand-off between the three kingdoms (picture red cliffs)

Tang Dynasty

Second Golden Age of China

• People: Wu Zetian, the only female emperor of China. She “interrupts” the Tang Dynasty to rule the Zhou Dynasty, but when she dies it goes back to Tang (picture Kool-aid man being split in two by a woman saying “Wooooo!”), Yang Guifei, the last of Chinas’ four great beauties — lots of good stories about her (we just picture a beautiful woman next to the Wu. We have not had trouble remembering “Yang”), Li Bai and Du Fu - poets (two guys arguing “Lean!”, “ No, Do!”)

• Concepts: Buddhism expands (Picture Buddha)

Song Dynasty

Technology Dynasty

• Stuff: the kitchen counter is covered with a compass, printing press, gun powder

• War: The dynasty ends with the Battle of Yamen, which destroys Chinas first real navy (The YMCA guys are singing “Yeah Man!”). The Song Dynasty teams up with the Mongols to fight the Munchus, but then the Mongols turn on them. Oops.

Yuan Dynasty

Mongol Dynasty

• People: Kublai Khan. Marco Polo (Kids playing Marco Polo in the pool)

• Concepts: The winds stop them from conquering Japan. The winds are called “Kamikaze” (picture a kamikaze fighter from WWII)

Ming Dynasty

Age of Exploration

• People: Founder is Hongwu emperor (I picture King Kong. It is a stretch, but you can see how I get there. Everest does not like it), his grandson is Yongle Emperor, who sponsored the voyages of Zheng He (he was really tall in real life so we picture a giant hanging on a zipper. Yongle is a dongle)

• Things: Yongle Emperor built the Forbidden Palace (we just picture the palace), Zheng lead the Seven Treasure Voyages (we picture our image for “7” - a curtain hook)

• Wars: Honghu started the dynasty with the Red Turban Rebellion (easy to picture), Battle of Tumu (picture two cows)

Qing Dynasty

Last Imperial Dynasty. Battles with Europe

• People: Golden Age emperor, Qinganlong (picture a giraffe with a long neck), Empress Dowager Cixi [She-zee] (a woman with big eyes that “see”)

• Wars:

  • Opium Wars (picture drug users and poppies)

  • Taiping Rebellion: ~30MM people died at the same time as the US Civil War (where ~700K died). The leader Hong Xiuquan (picture King Kong again) believed he was the younger brother of Jesus (picture Jesus) (picture King Kong typing on a typewriter)

  • Boxer Rebellion which was ended by the Eight Nation Alliance (picture Rocky)

Chinese Republic

• People: Sun Yat-sen (a sun), Chiang Kai-Shek, who led the KMT (a chain), Mao (himself)

• Events: Northern Expedition, Long March (obvious images), evacuation of the KMT to Taiwan (picture the chain swimming like a snake to Taiwan)

Communist China Under Mao

• People: Mao, Lin Biao, who initially led the Cultural Revolution (picture Lin Manuel Miranda), Jiang Qing, Mao’s last wife and leader of the Gang of Four after the death of Lin (the letter “G” hanging from a rope)

• Events: Great Leap Forward (frog), Great Chinese Famine (a dying sparrow — one of the causes of the famine was the “smash sparrows” campaign), Cultural Revolution (image is students working on farms)

Modern China

• People: Xi Jinping (Letter “Z”)

• Events: Tiananmen Square (picture Tank Man)

And that is it for the initial palace.

As we learn more things about Chinese history we drop them into appropriate location (for example the three of the Four Great Classics were written in the Ming Dynasty, so we add their images into that room). For every “item” that is bolded we have learned about them and build Anki cards like we would for any topic. Not ever fact needs to go into the memory palace, but it helps that the big things are there, because it is easier to place them in space.

Most importantly this method has created enough scaffolding that we can listen to podcasts and read books about China without being lost. By learning the core we have the tools to learn a lot more.

One last recommendation: I highly recommend this set of three children’s books re-telling the novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”. It is simple, illustrated and child-like, but by the time you are done you will know who the main players are from that time period and the most important stories from the actual 800,000-word novel. You will learn about the alliance formed in the Peach Garden, the brilliant strategic and tactical moves of Zhuge Liang, and, especially if you read it outloud to your younger kids, the names of the key characters. My 6-year old loved the books and was incredibly surprised to learn it was based on true events.

Competition Prep Update

It is seven weeks until Nationals. Everest is on top of her review cards, and we are on track adding ~5 review topics per week (Recall that “China from Xi - Ming” is an example of a “topic”. Qing Dynasty was a topic on its own. “Mao” was a topic. Other example topics we cna cover in a day include things like “The New Testament”, “Russian Wars”, “Native people and events pre-1800”, “Baroque and Classical Composers”, etc). Even at this pace we are NOT going to have time to cover everything she needs to know, but I have prioritized based on estimated number of questions she will get per topic, combined with how easy it will be for her to learn, and how likely she she will know the topic well enough to get the point before the other kids (We are basically throwing up our hands on any question about Hinduism. If she makes finals four of the five other kids she will be competing with will be Indian. For her to have a chance at the (maybe) one Hinduism-related question that might come up, she will have to know that religion in real depth. Better to give up that possible question and focus on other areas that are likely to come up that the other kids are likely to miss).

Keep Learning,

Edward (and Everest)